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When Brad Keselowski stood in front of his cheering No. 2 Penske Racing team on Nov. 18 last season — swigging from a super-sized pitcher of his sponsor’s Miller Lite beer — it did not strike him as a seminal moment for NASCAR.

After all, it wasn’t as if Keselowski was the first NASCAR Sprint Cup champion.

In fact, there were 28 champions of stock car racing’s top series before the native of Rochester Hills, Mich., made it 29 that night at Homestead Miami Speedway.

One of the drivers he beat at Homestead was Jimmie Johnson, who has his name on the Sprint Cup trophy five times over the past seven seasons.

Yet, Keselowski’s win, in just his third full Sprint Cup season, signalled a changing of the guard like no other since the late, great Dale Earnhardt dragged the sport kicking and screaming from of its southern U.S. roots to the national stage in the early 1980s.

What Keselowski brings to the table is a connection to a technically savvy fan base that grew up with cell phones as an appendage and the attention span of 140 characters or less.

That 18-35 audience is what all major-league sports organizations crave and what NASCAR has seen slipping away over the past half dozen seasons.

With Keselowski as its new face, NASCAR has been given a golden opportunity to coax that demographic and its bulging wallets back to the fold.

It all started just a year ago at the 2012 Daytona 500 when Juan Pablo Montoya slammed into a jet dryer that was cleaning up debris from a wreck.

The ensuing fireball was spectacular.

It was only Keselowski, however, who had a cell phone in his race car and, when he came upon the scene, he started to snap photos and immediately sent them out to the world via his Twitter account.

He became an instant Internet sensation, garnering more than 200,000 followers just minutes after his posting of the crash photos.

It was the springboard to a season-long success story that culminated in the championship nine months later for the 28-year-old Keselowski.

His beer-chugging, devil- may-care attitude, though, often overshadows a deadly serious athlete, but it is the perfect foil for the perceived vanilla personality of Johnson, who many felt had driven away a huge chunk of NASCAR’s youthful fans.

And Keselowski is keenly aware of his image and what it brings to the sport in this age if instant communication.

He does see himself as something of a latter-day Earnhardt, but one that knows what drives this new-age sports audience.

“I have my own way of doing things and there is a little pride thinking that some of that is back to the way some of the people earlier in the sport did it,” Keselowski said this week as he prepared for next Sunday’s 2013 version of the Daytona 500.

“I think you have to fight to be relevant and you can’t do things that were done in the past and feel like you are going to be relevant to today’s fans.

“I think you can find a balance for that and I think that is what drives me in a lot of things I do — whether I can drink beer or be on Twitter so I can go out and swear when I am on television.

“You have to be relevant but you also have to stay connected to your roots. That is kind of speaking out of both sides of your mouth, but that is what our sport needs and what our fans expect.”

Keselowski revels in the fact that he brings a new, edgy style to NASCAR that has been missing for too long, whether it be his paint swapping driving style on the track or his unconventional dressing style off the track.

“There is nothing wrong with a little style,” he said. “Everyone likes a little style. I feel like I have a little style. I am wearing white shoes. Who else wears white shoes?”

He said the Twitter incident last year at Daytona was not planned, but was just an extension of who he is and he thinks that is why young fans see him as cool.

“I think when it comes to moments like that, they really are only cool because they are authentic,” Keselowski said. “They are new, fresh, authentic and not forced.

“When that moment happened at Daytona, I just did it. I didn’t think much about it.

“I thought it was something different and wanted to take a picture of it and send it out. If I tried to calculate that, I never could in a million years.

“You can’t plan those things. I think that when you do things out of that spot in your heart and mind that are authentic it showcases who you are and what you think is cool.”

Certainly there are those in NASCAR who think that as the new season gets under way next week, Keselowski will have to face the fact that as champion he may have to tone down his act.

One of those who thinks that is five-time champion Johnson.

“I think he will be more aware of his voice,” Johnson said. “Once you are the champion, your voice carries much further. The more success you have in the sport, the voice will carry further and further.

“I had my own experiences where I would just casually mention something, and I didn’t realize how far it went, and maybe I wasn’t as accurate as I needed to be. So, I think he’ll have a few moments like that which will rein him back in some, and make him think about what he says and be more calculated.”

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Keselowski the new face of NASCAR

When Brad Keselowski stood in front of his cheering No. 2 Penske Racing team on Nov. 18 last season — swigging from a super-sized pitcher of his sponsor’s Miller Lite beer — it did not strike him as a seminal moment for NASCAR.

After all, it wasn’t as if Keselowski was the first NASCAR Sprint Cup champion.

In fact, there were 28 champions of stock car racing’s top series before the native of Rochester Hills, Mich., made it 29 that night at Homestead Miami Speedway.

One of the drivers he beat at Homestead was Jimmie Johnson, who has his name on the Sprint Cup trophy five times over the past seven seasons.

Yet, Keselowski’s win, in just his third full Sprint Cup season, signalled a changing of the guard like no other since the late, great Dale Earnhardt dragged the sport kicking and screaming from of its southern U.S. roots to the national stage in the early 1980s.

What Keselowski brings to the table is a connection to a technically savvy fan

It was a beatdown of monumental
proportions on Sunday when six
Chevrolets, led by the No. 2 Team
Penske Chevy of Juan Pablo Montoya,
crossed the start-finish line ahead of
the first Honda at the Verizon IndyCar
Series season opening Firestone Grand
Prix of St. Petersburg.